Why It Is Risky to Have a Woke CEO

This argument boils down to 1. It’s difficult to prioritize multiple things (the environment and public interest are mentioned as examples), so why bother? 2. Prioritizing profit has worked so far

Regarding 2 - strictly from the lens of shareholder value, yes, but in terms of environmental impact and public interest, no, it hasn’t. Most corporate profit and presumed value to society has completely ignored negative externalities imposed on the public and on the environment. Our society is increasingly unequal and rigid, and climate change Is already having an impact. When corporate actions result in the eventual loss of cities, environments and lives to flooding - these things are important, and the corporations and their shareholders socialize the costs out to everybody while retaining the bulk of the benefits and profits for themselves.

The author does a shockingly bad job of defending the current corporate ethos and the fact that increased stock value and corporate profits are many times at the expense of society and the environment.

This seems custom tailored to be the least convincing argument against wokeness to the people who'd generally support it in my experience.

They are making some technical point about the importance of the profit motive for the decision making. Process of CEOs. I could imagine this going well with a person who views all jobs as exploitative or thinks society should be egalitarian or something like that.

This comes with the assumption that maximizing the profit motive actually is sufficient to make solving our social problems possible, and that serving the narrow interests of corporate responsibility to their stakeholders is worse than serving the narrow interests of their shareholders.